Thousands of EV’s rotting in fields in China

By Jo Nova

China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.

Newsweek: How China plans to Crush Elon Musk in Electric Car Market

The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.

“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”

Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money.  In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.

Who knows what the real price of an EV is in China?

The long running subsidy ended in January, causing a decline in sales, which was supposedly only 1.4% down, but was somehow so bad (whatever the real number was) that several cities leapt to offer their own subsidies of about US$1,452 per car, and now the government has decided to extend the “EV Tax incentives”.

Not surprisingly, given the waste, inefficiency, and purposeless grind, something bad is happening in the Chinese economy — all car sales (petrol and EV’s) are down nearly 20%.

Which is not to say Western economies don’t have their waste, inefficiency, and purposeless grind.

Elon may be getting the last laugh if this May 31 headline is correct:

Tesla’s $37,000 Model Y is outselling EVs that are seven times cheaper in China

Hat tip to Simon Thompson

…. torn line Image by starline on Freepik

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 81 ratings

56 comments to Thousands of EV’s rotting in fields in China

  • #
    Honk R Smith

    Which decomposes faster …
    an abandoned field of economically unviable E cars …
    or an abandoned economically unviable wind mill energy farm?

    Just wondering.

    460

    • #
      Saighdear

      ACTUALLY: maybe it’s the FIELD ….. ONE Year’s seeding = MANY Years WEEDING.. these Dam Eco nuts with their non-herbicides and fewer insecticides – we have so many problems now in our traditional cropping – a little of everything, being knocked out by the Monocultures of OSR, and potatoes especially. More problems with Blight and Flea-Beetle + Caterpillars akin to Cabbage White. Fruit trees being plagued by Bigger Birds, breaking the fragile new branch growth, pecking off the Leaves and fruitlets + green buds. What to do? cheaper and less stressful to go buy contaminated food from supermarket. GMO’s etc and whatever BIG Farmer wants to feed us.
      SO covered up may as well be under King Crete …become sterile. decomposes ?

      40

  • #
    David Maddison

    It’s always a shocking thing to see the extent of waste in a command economy like China.

    Similarly in Western countries where a vestige of free enterprise still remains but where market forces have been suppressed in various areas and government policies force the adoption of wasteful, destructive, inefficient technologies such as solar panels and windmills etc..

    The core business model of the owners of these devices is not generating energy, they have no interest in that, but harvesting subsidies from suffering domestic and industrial consumers.

    In Australia, the subsidy harvesters harvest their subsidy directly from the consumer rather than taxpayers via the government. It is a form of legislated theft. Electricity distribution companies are forced to buy the expensive, useless, random solar and wind product from the subsidy harvesters in preference to buying from the efficient and inexpensive coal and gas producers whose product can only be purchased when there is no more solar and wind to sell.

    As more and more socialist policies are applied in Australia and other Western countries, there will be more and more waste of the type we see in China and more and more well-connected Elites profiting from producing useless things.

    In Australia and similar countries, when you see the countryside polluted by windmills and solar panels, remember, those structures would not exist if it were not for legalised theft from consumers and/or taxpayers. In that sense they are not much different to the fields of unused EVs in China except that windmills get used to produce a useless product about 30% of the time.

    650

    • #
      Ted1.

      David the RET is not not a tax. The only reason for it not being a tax is that “they” said it is not a tax, and you said it is not a tax.

      If you said it is not not a tax then it would be a tax.

      Is that clear?.

      220

    • #
      Ronin

      Does this remind one of the EU’s butter mountains and wine lakes.

      50

  • #
    John Hultquist

    The image has been used elsewhere {France} and may be something other than it is said to be.
    The car graveyard has been there since as early as 2019, according to a photo gallery by the Chinese state-owned newspaper People’s Daily.
    According to an article by the South China Morning Post, the nearly 3,000 cars parked in the lot belonged to Microcity, a ride-sharing company
    .”

    I think until someone provides better info, I’ll sit on the bench.

    142

    • #
      Graeme#4

      The original video contained two stories, one being about the ride share cars. The other video seemed to be of cars that were registered by the car maker but weren’t being sold, so I believe that this story seems to have legs.

      140

  • #
    Klem

    I have sympathy for the world’s automakers. Governments have forced them to build EVs, and no one wants to buy them because they are terrible cars. EVs are so terrible that governments have to pay people to buy them. In a few years those rediculous EV mandates will be rescinded and automakers will be left with $billions in loses. You can see this disaster coming from miles away.

    490

    • #
      Uber

      As with the European diesel fiasco. We had our own LPG fiasco too, and the John Howard sugar fiasco. Try getting hold of LPG for your car these days. Funny how we keep going back to petrol.

      10

      • #

        Pump LPG, is i suspect still easier to find than an available public EV fast charger !
        But mass LPG availability was killed by both the removal of the conversion subsidy, and the replacement of those LPG Falcon taxi’s with hybrid Toyota’s !
        Also compounded by the death of those local Holden and Ford models that were available with factory fitted LPG, and even “dual Fuel” systems.
        Side note..
        I have seen reports of a Toyota Camry Hybrid with a “Tri Fuel” ..petrol/ Electric/ LPG drive system giving incredible fuel efficiency !

        10

    • #
      Spitfire

      I wouldn’t say all of them are terrible – some are much better than others, but they do have their limitations. The main ones are range and the availability of fast-charging points. My dad has a Benz EQA250, and it’s a great car to drive: accelerates fast and handles really well, and is packed with gizmos. But he bought it for fun and short trips, as it’s likely the last car he’ll own and thought it’d be cool to have an electric one. He doesn’t pay any attention to the fairytale of zero emissions and all that rot.

      30

  • #
    Henrik Kliebhan

    Not their first and not their last bubble. Good idea to hide from the collapse of the mother of all failed communist eco systems😁

    181

  • #
    mondopinion

    Horrifying — yet our planned obsolescence has probably created more waste — greatlly more.

    111

  • #
    Neville

    This is the greatest Ponzi scheme in history and makes Bernie Madoff’s vile deception look very tiny by comparison.
    If we add the UNRELIABLE, TOXIC W & S disasters to the UNRELIABLE, TOXIC EVs we are now entering new territory for waste and inefficiency.
    This will certainly end in disaster and just a pity that the wealthy OECD countries seem to be leading the mob.
    Why have we abandoned proper science and well researched R & D + simple kindy sums to fall for this lunacy?
    Why do our govt’s deny that the last 0.1% of our existence has seen the greatest Human flourishing ever and all because of the use of FOSSIL FUELS?
    Why do fossil fuels still provide over 80% of total world energy and why do China, India and all the developing countries understand that coal, oil, gas are still the key ingredients for a more prosperous future?

    370

    • #
      Mike Jonas

      Neville, you are correct, of course. This Ponzi scheme should, in any sane world, put Australia into recession any day now. But this is not a sane world, unless by “sane” you mean that our elites lining their own pockets at the expense of the general population is just business, not insanity. But our federal government is onto it. Just as in past years, a substantial immigration flow can disguise recession by costing enough money that it boosts GDP by enough to cover the decreased incomes of the existing population. At the start of the millenium, around 100,000 immigrants a year was enough to hide recession. The Albo government took the number up to 195,000 immigrants last year, and the way things are going, a few million more this year might just balance the books. My thought is that another “recession we have to have” is looking like a relatively attractive proposition.

      120

      • #

        The Albo government took the number up to 195,000 immigrants last year,….

        Actually, it was reported this week that the Australian NET imigration last year was 440,000 ..!

        130

  • #
    Steve

    EVs only have one purpose to extract cash from the gullible. No surprise that China ‘may’ also have unscrupulous people just like in the West. And in fact, Mr sterzel doesn’t have an up to date insiders view of China since he quit to live in LA where he peddles his wares.

    121

  • #
    Hanrahan

    A few years ago there were acres of unsold ICE cars. Old race tracks were popular storage places.

    25

    • #
      North+Vega

      Unsold, or there were no microchips to place in the vehicles motherboards due to a CoVid lockdowns?

      40

      • #
        Hanrahan

        Well before the pandemic or chip shortage. A search finds answers to unsold vehicles ….. about 9 years ago.

        20

    • #
      John Connor II

      Yes, I’ve seen those photos.
      Huge lots of cars that car dealers don’t want and can’t sell, forced onto them, to inflate numbers.
      It’s called channel stuffing.
      The problem, little known as it is, is called micro-rust, where ICE’s will develop microscopic rust internally, seizing the engines if left too long.

      10

    • #
      Hanrahan

      I notice 4 reds. There is a lot of groupthink here – no alternative opinions allowed.

      That’s how the people you say are wrong argue.

      01

      • #
        Uber

        Yet your comment is published, so your complaint is nonsense. What, people aren’t allowed to not like what you say?
        I think this article is very light on facts, and we can’t take too much out of it. On the other hand, your comparison with the inevitable excess production from the millions of ICE cars produced every year is facile and irrelevant.

        10

      • #
        Mike Jonas

        I think that people don’t like giving reds much and prefer to argue the case if they think someone is incorrect – see for an immediate example #11.1.1 in this page which disagrees with something I said and as I type has two greens, yet my #11.1 as yet has no reds.

        Unlike many “progressive” sites, everyone is welcome to express an opinion here (many thanks to Jo), it’s just that there are many who don’t come here because they want to be protected from any inconvenient (to them) ideas. It is incredibly easy to get banned on a “progressive” (or should that be regressive?) site just for making an “inconvenient” statement no matter how carefully and politely it is put and no matter if fully supporting evidence is supplied.

        00

  • #
    Geoffrey Williams

    A clear case of oversupply!
    And all from the same factory . .

    60

  • #
    Graeme No.3

    China’s debt to economy ratio is reported to be 62.4% (World Economics) or 77% by the IMF.
    The first estimate is based on the Chinese economy going well, but we have no way of really knowing what the real state is. No can we guess what debt is concealed e.g. Banks which are reported as being bankrupt but kept going by various organs of the CCP.
    The figures are not as high as Japan (240.7%) Italy (119.0%), France 98.9%, Spain (93.6%) the UK (78.4%).
    Russia with 11.7% is the lowest. (Australia 51.6%).

    The World Economics figure would have these EVs being a boost to the Chinese economy, so the IMF might be closer, but the Chinese claim to be overwhelming & expanding is doubtful. Their system is struggling. (Taiwan 19.7% so it isn’t a racial one).

    71

    • #
      Mike Jonas

      Daniel Andrews is currently negotiating the sale of Victoria to China. On the face of it, that should make the Chinese debt figure even worse, but that’s not how it works. The sale will be executed in two steps, of which the first is an un-repayable loan by China to Victoria. Thus Victoria’s debt level would go up (it’s already something like 999% of GDP) and China’s would go down (being owed money should be accounted for as negative debt, shouldn’t it).

      80

      • #
        Sceptical+Sam

        Mike, Your 999% figure is surely tongue in cheek. You might like to check the figures.

        The Victorian State Domestic Product is around $515 billion (2022) and when I last looked, State debt was round 25% of that.

        20

      • #
        Ronin

        “Daniel Andrews is currently negotiating the sale of Victoria to China.
        On the face of it, it should increase the IQ of both counties.

        20

  • #
    Kalm Keith

    The good news for China is that while they have to sequester the EV “miscalculation”, at least they don’t have to worry about cleaning up the gigantic mess of wind turbines and solar panels from which they’ve received similar benefits.

    Australian politicians have readily taken on that task, for the good of the Planet, or something similar.

    No financial considerations were involved in this arrangement. Honestly.

    130

  • #
    David Maddison

    How do you “sequester” EVs?

    Do you bury them in the ground like windmills?

    70

    • #
      Kalm Keith

      David, when you’re trying to cover up a huge mistake like thousands of rotting EVs, it’s always useful to use a nice technical term like that.
      It makes people think it has some level of legitimacy.

      As to photons, one of the definitions I came across said that they were particles and this immediately brought back the image of hot golf balls being ejected from CO2 “randomly” 360 degrees, some of them heading to earth.

      As mentioned earlier this can be dangerous to humans.

      🙂

      81

    • #
      NuThink

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/07/25/in-china-train-crash-buried-evidence/?sh=35387cdf140a

      David, maybe like this!
      But of course it was lightning wot did it – not incompetence – or lack of proper safety systems.

      Images showing backhoes shoveling the wreckage of train compartment cars into large dump pits circulated on line in China, and speculation has mounted in the last 24 hours regarding a possible cover-up to conceal evidence crucial to the investigation. The high speed rail is a national honor in China and one of the country’s best examples of 21st century modernity. Burying parts of the wreckage was “part of the rescue operation and not an attempt to hide evidence. It was necessary to bury the damaged carriages to make way for mechanical equipment to proceed with rescue efforts,” Railways Ministry spokesman Wang Yongping said at a news conference on Sunday night.

      Wang was responding to chinese reporters who had questioned why some damaged cars were being torn apart and dumped into the ground. Beijing News on Monday quoted people from the China Railway No. 3 Engineering Group as saying that the pits were dug to make room for a giant crane to lift away the rest of the carriages that remain on the overhead rail tracks. Footage broadcast by China Central Television on Monday showed several damaged carriages still lying on the ground at the site.

      They had to bury the evidence so that the large cranes could get in. No investigation needed.

      70

      • #
        NuThink

        See what good terms Pelosi was with China in 2008 when she was checking whether or not to purchase high speed trains.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#/media/File:Beijing-Tianjin_High_Speed_Train.jpg

        The good terms soured after she went to Taiwan.

        70

        • #
          David Maddison

          I’ve been on one of those trains. I went from Lhasa in Tibet to Guangzhou in China on the Z266 train. It took 55 hours 5 min for a distance of 4,980km.

          50

          • #
            Greg in NZ

            David, back in the good old daze, I went from Guangzhou to Lhasa – by bus, boat, and train – in 3 months… admittedly zig-zagging all over the show but hey, when yer young you’ve got all the time in the world: even managed to get ‘arrested’ on a few occasions for being ‘out of bounds’, yet the magic words, Xin Xilan, or New Zealand, kept me out of jail when the Ministry of Internal Affairs suits realised the foreign devil imperialist spy was merely an inquisitive, if foolhardy, polite young traveller.

            Tibet was, literally, a breath of fresh air.

            60

      • #
        Ronin

        “It was necessary to bury the damaged carriages to make way for mechanical equipment to proceed with rescue efforts,”
        Of course, why would anyone disbelieve that story from China, oh, wait.

        10

  • #
    Mike Jonas

    I doubt that any of those Chinese abandoned EVs will spontaneously combust. You see, if you put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese manufacturer, you can get the subsidy for every “sold” car, and once it is safely parked in a paddock neither the car nor its subsidy needs the battery any more. So surely the manufacturer will remove the battery once the car is “sold” and parked, and use it for the next subsidy. Oops, sorry, the next sale.

    Following on with that logic, does the fact that the cars still have wheels suggest that the picture may be misrepresented???

    70

  • #
    Steve

    Aren’t we all just burying our powers of critical analysis by believing exactly what we are told by one single (biased) source ?
    Doesn’t this tell us more about ourselves than it does about the Chinese ?
    Just saying …

    43

    • #
      Simon Thompson ᵐᵇ ᵇˢ

      Do “Ghost cities” exist in China Komrade Steve ? It is exactly the same misallocation of capital. I would go further and suggest the Komrads behind this ponzi scheme have wisely migrated to Australia. I still can’t fathom Chinese Nationals owning homes in Australia when China forbids >$10000 a year to leave China.

      130

  • #
    STJOHNOFGRAFTON

    If there was a thermal runnaway in the Lithium batteries in just a couple of those cars on that graveyard lot there would be an enormous chain reaction leading to catastrophic heat and toxic smoke pollution. Surely the batteries are removed safely prior to graveyarding those cars?

    60

  • #
    Old Goat

    Mike,
    Those EV’s can’t be shipped because of the fire risk . Awareness is growing regarding weight, fire risk and cost . EV’s are a property managers nightmare – insurance companies don’t want to insure buildings with EV’s and chargers in the carpark . How long before having an EV makes your house very expensive to insure? The push for net zero is gift wrapped excreta .

    160

  • #

    A perhaps naive question: why make the cars in the first place, if your program is basically a fraud?

    50

    • #
      Neville

      Karim I think any Ponzi scheme is just another way to get access to other people’s money.
      Bernie Madoff had access to many billions of $ for decades and just pretended to invest the funds for his clients. And the attractive dividends he paid (?????) kept everyone happy until the GFC crap hit the fan.

      30

    • #
      Hanrahan

      I suspect for the same reason we are building windmills.

      20

  • #

    I doubt the “rotting in fields, ..throwing away,” etc. claims.
    I suspect this is just an old pic of EVs/cars stored as a result of the electrical compnent shortage of the past few years.
    EVs in particular were much more vunerable to those shortages.

    40

    • #
      Hanrahan

      If so they wouldn’t be registered.

      The EV manufactures are falling like nine pins, collecting subsidies, hoping to sell. Trouble is – So are a dozen others with the same business model.

      50

      • #

        Hanrahan
        June 18, 2023 at 7:45 pm · Reply
        If so they wouldn’t be registered.

        ..? Do weknow if they are ALL registered ?..
        …..certainly those ex share cars would be,…but we didnt see many of the rego plates .

        Thought … does the Chinese authorities actually need to prove registration in order to exaggerate production or sales volumes ?
        ( remember some of the major attrocities that regime has committed !)

        11

  • #
  • #

    […] Thousands of EV’s rotting in fields in China […]

    00

  • #
    Neville

    The UN Sec general has gone far left wing troppo.
    Now he lies that fossil fuels are a threat to Human survival and this is despite all the facts and data over the last 200 years or 100 years or 50 years etc.
    Look up all of the UN data as used by Dr Hans Rosling or Macrotrends etc.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/18/watch-un-chief-claims-fossil-fuels-are-incompatible-with-human-survival/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

    30

  • #
    Rafe+Champion

    Look at his program on the ruin of South Africa on the back of the daily power outages due to the looting of funds from their national energy company.

    https://youtu.be/jHxh_sQHH0E

    10

  • #
    Gee Aye

    I think I know why they have dumped these. They put the steering wheel on the wrong side.

    30

  • #
    mundi

    What happened here is simply that the companies got government grants on the condition that the cars don’t hit the local economy and depress prices for 8 years. The company turned out not to be viable, but that doesn’t release them from the 8 years. They don’t go through an administration process or anything, they are government owned. The cars will stay there ‘just incase’ they are needed by some government program. Employees are assigned on guard duty, but there no serious attempt at maintenance.

    The chinese government abruptly ended these subsides on 1st Jan 2023 – because of all the companies that were failing, but its been going on for about 7 years. It was a big push to meant to end the private ownership of cars and have everyone using government based taxi service.

    00